Sitecore Instance Manager error

Challenge:

It is near to midnight in India and my phone is saying me that I should go to sleep. But before I go for sleep. Would like to make sure I blog my learning which took most part of my day and was scrathing my head.

So, I got a new laptop which has Windows 10 on it. Was trying to configure your and mine favorite Sitecore Tool – SIM (If you haven’t heard of Sitecore Instance Manager (SIM) and you are newbie then it’s fine. It is Army knife of Sitecore Developer, and a must need to have tool in your toolset)

After installing was trying to pass through initial configuration and it was tough to pass through following dialog.

In Summary, This seems file system related error. But behind the scenes it also tries to check SQL rights. So, go back and make sure your connection string is right. What I would suggest you to do is. Take that username and password and try to login using SQL Server Management studio and try to create dummy database and delete it using same credentials. This should work. Also, make sure you are running your SQL Service using NETWORK SERVICE account

Also, please make sure you are running SIM as Administrator user

One more thing, Make sure your SIM.EXE is not blocked, as it was downloaded from Web. If so, please unblock it

After doing SQL Server related changes make sure you restart SQL Server – Then only changes will take effect

Then I got busy with other things and thought to find Plan B. Which was installing Plain Sitecore using Sitecore installer. I did that using Sitecore Installer (exe) was able to install Sitecore successfully!

But still that problem was still going on in back of my mind [We are same! ;)]. So, thought to ask few awesome Sitecore developers internally they gave few ideas. But everything was tried. Was about to go to bed and thought to troubleshoot a bit and then go for sleep. And I tried to reproduce the issue. But couldn’t, it was fixed! How?

As per my understanding:

All above mentioned changes

And Installing Sitecore using Sitecore installer

Fixed this issue! I can’t say it confidently. Till I get fresh laptop where I try exact same steps or one of you also try the same and confirm it for us!

Or Alen might have some idea and he improves that error message which indicates exact error message.

After writing above line, I realized that SIM is now open source and Alen and Sitecore’s vision will be fulfilled. If I am able to find this BUG and Fix it or narrow it down. So, I went ahead and cloned repository in my local and have been able to locate code which is causing this behavior. message variable is same for both scenarios – File system and local

And this is what TestSqlServer method does:

After looking at code, I noticed that there has been lot of logging going on. So, thought to find out log file and found it here : C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\Sitecore\Sitecore Instance Manager\Logs and found following errors: